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“Wildly inventive.. [a] rangy, obsessive immersion in food and its many wonders. [T]he tools needed to learn to cook well can be deployed in every manner of endeavor, from skinning a deer to memorizing a deck of cards. The author distills them into minimal, learnable units and examines how to order the units so as to keep readers engaged in their endeavors. Ferriss is a beguiling guide to this process, at once charmingly smart aleck-y and deadly serious, and he aims to make readers knowledgeable and freethinking.” - Kirkus Reviews

The 4-Hour Chef isn’t just a cookbook. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure guide to the world of rapid learning.

#1 New York Times bestselling author (and lifelong non-cook) Tim Ferriss takes you from Manhattan to Okinawa, and from Silicon Valley to Calcutta, unearthing the secrets of the world’s fastest learners and greatest chefs. Ferriss uses cooking to explain “meta-learning,” a step-by-step process that can be used to master anything, whether searing steak or shooting 3-pointers in basketball. That is the real “recipe” of The 4-Hour Chef.

You'll train inside the kitchen for everything outside the kitchen. Featuring tips and tricks from chess prodigies, world-renowned chefs, pro athletes, master sommeliers, super models, and everyone in between, this “cookbook for people who don’t buy cookbooks” is a guide to mastering cooking and life.

The 4-Hour Chef is a five-stop journey through the art and science of learning:

1. META-LEARNING. Before you learn to cook, you must learn to learn. META charts the path to doubling your learning potential.

2. THE DOMESTIC. DOM is where you learn the building blocks of cooking. These are the ABCs (techniques) that can take you from Dr, Seuss to Shakespeare.

3. THE WILD. Becoming a master student requires self-sufficiency in all things. WILD teaches you to hunt, forage, and survive.

4. THE SCIENTIST. SCI is the mad scientist and modernist painter wrapped into one. This is where you rediscover whimsy and wonder.

5. THE PROFESSIONAL. Swaraj, a term usually associated with Mahatma Gandhi, can be translated as “self-rule.” In PRO, we’ll look at how the best in the world become the best in the world, and how you can chart your own path far beyond this book.

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These White Chocolate Chip and Pistachio Cookies have a delectable flavor and texture.

About the Author

Tim Ferriss is author of the #1 New York Times best sellers The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body. He’s been called “The Superman of Silicon Valley” by Wired, one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and “the world’s best guinea pig” by Newsweek, which ranked him in its top 10 “most powerful” personalities on the 2012 Digital 100 Power Index. He is an adviser and faculty member at Singularity University, based at NASA Ames Research Center, which focuses on leveraging accelerating technologies to address global problems. Tim’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Economist, and The New Yorker, among many others.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Disclaimer: I am a real reviewer who actually purchased and read the book. I felt compelled to write my first review because I was annoyed in two ways: first, the clearly fake reviewers, second, the readers who came in with ridiculous expectations about the contents of the book.

Second disclaimer: I am NOT a Tim worshiper. The 4-Hour Workweek is a sometimes unethical pipe dream that a couple people writers imitating Tim have made money on. For most of us, it contains a couple tricks to be more efficient at our 9-5. The 4-Hour Body is a relatively interesting and fun book on fitness and diet experimentation. I learned a few tips and tricks from it and really enjoyed reading about his experiences. I have read most of Tim's blog and consider it a sometimes better alternative to "Life Hacker".

Those two disclaimers being said, this is a GREAT book if you come in with the right expectations. If you're looking for 600+ pages solely devoted to grocery shopping, prep, recipes, cooking and eating, you will not find it here. You'll find about 200-250 pages dedicated solely to such, and 200 more at least somewhat related--consisting of wilderness cooking and survival, great restaurants, 140 character recipes, and basic tools you need in the kitchen. At a macro level, the most useful cooking lessons are Tim's notes on equipment to have in your kitchen, his 10 easy recipes (most of which are really interesting/easy shortcuts), and the charts on spices that go with different countries. At a micro level, I picked up a few random tidbits from the 1/2-pagers on how to quickly defrost a steak, how to make the perfect cup of coffee, etc. The most important part of this section is that Tim teaches you HOW to cook, not just how to follow a recipe.Read more ›

Tim Ferriss tells you right off that this isn't a book about cooking, just like Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance isn't about Zen or changing oil. He'll teach you how to handle a knife and make a few interesting dishes, but mostly he takes you on a long, strange, self-indulgent, and sometimes useful trip.

What I enjoyed:

-- Ferriss's storytelling. He has a nice way with words: "Mangalitsa acorn-finished woolly boar tasted just like acorns. I was chewing on fall, clear as crystal, in a sliver of cured ham."

-- His emphasis on the slow food movement and local, organic farming. (But strangely, his "Clean 15" foods include sweet corn, which is mostly genetically modified.)

-- His language hacking tips, which are gold. I've always wanted to master several languages and found his methodology solid and logical.

-- The 140-character Twitter recipes from almost every country in the world: fun, simple, and intriguing.

What I didn't like:

-- Ferriss's tangential teaching style. At one point he goes from braising to English's 100 most common written words to kickboxing to chess to tango spins in order to emphasize the importance of selection and sequencing. It didn't work for me, because I often lost track of the original concept.

-- His foray in into survival and hunting skills, just so you can make your own venison burger. (If you want some cricket protein bars, however, you'll need to mail order the crickets.) This section could have been a separate book and might have been fascinating as a metaphor/methodology for learning entrepreneurial skills.Read more ›

I am a fan of Tim Ferris but I have to say that this book over promises and under delivers. Ferris is the master of marketing and hype and even teaches you his techniques on his blog so it is very easy to pick out what he did. Here are some of my thoughts on the book.

- The book claims it's not a book about cooking yet 80% of the content is food related. He talks a lot about meta-learning but doesn't really dive into learning types and just gives generic learning tips.- The book reads almost like a magazine and jumps all over the place as you progress through.- Random mens magazine style tips (how shoot a jumpshot??, Knifes, guns, camping etc) I feel like I'm reading a GQ magazine.- Really big book, the formatting is good but some of the pictures looked very amateur.- You can tell he didn't write a lot of content of the book. Ferris is the master of outsourcing yet he makes it seems like he is the jack of all trades.- Tons of pages of recipes (I thought this wasn't a cookbook?)

...more later as I progress through the book.

Overall I would say that it is a very entertaining book but I didn't find it more educational than any magazine you can pickup off the newsstands.

Just a short review to say that I found this book to be unfocused and scattered. I think some of the information is interesting, but I didn't like the organisation of material at all. For 4 hour fanatics it's clearly going to be worth reading, but the average person will probably find the 4 hour work week or 4 hour body more interesting and useful.